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Stephen Hume: Minor hockey means serious risks

Pee wee hockey is the first level of minor hockey where bodychecking is allowed. Safety is a common topic at general meetings by minor hockey associations.

Photograph by: Grant Black
, Postmedia News files

As the National Hockey League and provincial major junior leagues grind into playoff season, provincial and local minor hockey associations across the country go into annual general meeting mode.

Now is the time for parents to instruct the minor hockey bureaucrats to whom they delegate responsibility for the safety of their children to deal with bodychecking and brain injury for players participating at the entry level of Canada's game.

Leading neurologists, pediatricians, institutes specializing in brain and spinal cord injuries, parents whose kids have paid the price of ignorance and inaction and the often-marginalized minor hockey officials who actually do pay attention to research are generally agreed that bodychecking is really bad for kids under 15.

On average, two minor hockey players - the majority of them aged 10 to 14 - suffer brain damage requiring medical intervention on every day of every hockey season. Got that? Two brain-injured kids per day, every day, every hockey season.

Players aged 10-14 are most vulnerable. They are six times more likely to be brain-injured in a collision with another player than kids under nine and three times more likely than players aged 15-19.

The short-term consequences can range from memory loss to cognitive and learning disabilities. Long-term effects have yet to be fully determined. In some cases they take decades to emerge.

We're now seeing professional athletes develop degenerative brain diseases linked to youthful and repeated sports concussions. The picture is not pretty.

Such injuries are particularly significant for teenagers, neurological research at the University of British Columbia indicates. It involved taking magnetic snapshots of developing adolescent brains to map the effects of concussions. The images are dramatic - and deeply troubling.

So, what to do?

First, no minor hockey association should deliberate about the subject of bodychecking under 15 without being fully informed on the medical effects.

Presentations from medical and brain injury experts should be at the top of every agenda.

Second, parents must be fully informed about the real risks of brain injury inherent in bodychecking for kids under 15.

They deserve to be told exactly what such brain damage can do to their children's cognitive ability and its potential impact upon future education, employment and social life.

Minor hockey has a fiduciary duty to fully inform parents at the time they are asked to sign waivers when registering for minor hockey.

Hockey enthusiasts who see minor hockey as the farm for the NHL either pooh-pooh the indisputable when it comes to brain and spinal cord injury risks or cite it as part of the toughening-up process for the rigours of professional hockey.

Even if you accept the risk of a permanent brain injury as a reasonable trade-off for a million-dollar-a-year hockey career, can we please dispense with delusion? Ninety-nine per cent of minor hockey players won't make the NHL. Why subject the recreational majority to risk of long-term impairment when doing so doesn't even benefit the elite one per cent?

Third, politicians - get involved in this discussion. You provide program funds and facilities where these brain injuries occur, so you can't wash your hands of the outcomes.

Fourth, professional hockey players - some leadership, please. There is something ironic about NHL stars basking in the positive publicity that comes with their entirely commendable support for children's hospitals while minor hockey rumbles along in the background as a brain damage machine that puts 250 kids a year into hospitals.

Bill Bennett, the province's minister of community, sport and cultural development deserves credit for saying last weekend that while he's no expert, he wants parents and coaches to be fully informed about medical research findings about the impact of bodychecking at a young age.

Indeed, let's have a robust public discussion about the ethics and desirability of this bodychecking tradition, which is ostensibly about making "men" out of boys while damaging thousands and driving many from the sport.

Finally, this isn't about emasculating hockey, it's just about making it safer for the youngest, most vulnerable players.

Research shows no significant difference in the injury rate for players who learn bodychecking skills after the age of 15.

Delaying bodychecking until after elite players have been streamed for advanced levels of play won't affect those players' chances. It will make hockey a lot safer for younger players who don't have those skills and will never need them.

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